Scratch the Surface

“Oh my Lord,” she gasped, clearly horrified. “Lance is on the grill and actin’ the fool!” she yelled to someone other than me, who I’d bet was her husband. “Jeremiah, honey, I’m so sorry. He’s got a bit too big for his britches here lately.”

It wasn’t “lately,” but I wasn’t about to argue. “Yeah, and you know how he gets when we try and rush him, and Oz can’t do nothin’ without gettin’ in his way, and Harley’s stuck in the middle, so if you could come on over…” I made sure to exhale deeply, adding a whine in there for good measure, sounding a bit more desperate than the situation actually was. “And maybe bring Mel, if you would. I could use him too.”

“Oh, he would just love that,” she assured me cheerfully. I could hear her move through her house and then the jingle of keys before she yelled for her husband. “We’ll be right on over.”

“Thank you, darlin’,” I murmured, and hung up.

Slipping my phone into my back pocket, I walked past the empty break room, the time clock—where I stopped to punch in—and the bulletin board, where everything from coupons to band flyers were tacked up. There were lockers on the right, the POS office, where the safe was and where the cash drawers were counted at the end of the night, and in front of me, the swinging door that opened out into the loud, bustling restaurant.

The place was packed, which was normal every night, but the closer it got to the weekend—like this Thursday night—the crazier it got. Instantly, though, I saw problems. There were people with kids sitting at tables with no food, only water, and the bar to the right, near the front door, was four deep with people ordering drinks but also, I was sure, waiting to be seated. It was noisy, tempers were flaring, as there was some shoving going on, and I could see the outside seating was not being used at all.

Crossing the dining room, I rounded up four servers, the frat boys, our boss called them, all working nights while they went to college. I was in the same boat, just much older than them, currently working on my master’s. Of course, they’d all started the semester after they graduated. I wasn’t able to start my foray into higher learning until I could save enough for tuition, which meant two years of working after high school, not starting until I was twenty. To go sooner I would have needed student loans, and because there was no way to verify my mother’s income, since she’d split when I was fourteen—the year I started working as a barback—it would have been impossible to get any money for the Bachelor of Social Work I hadn’t finished until last year when I was twenty-four.

There was no father on my birth certificate, and when I’d asked Marla Wolfe years ago if she could recall which one-night stand he was, she assured me she had no earthly idea. She was drunk the night she gave birth to me, so it was a wonder I hadn’t come out brain damaged. I was pretty sure I had the nuns at St. Anne’s to thank, since that was where the underage, unwed mothers who weren’t allowed to attend Barrett Crossing High School went. She had been sober through the important part of her pregnancy, when my brain was developing, but not toward the end. I always gave the sisters free appetizers when they stopped in.

Opening the doors that led out to the enormous patio, I ordered the frat boys to wipe down the picnic tables while I flipped on the lights that framed the area, as well as the fairy lights that had been meticulously strung over the summer when we closed for two weeks to renovate the kitchen and the bar.

At the hostess stand, I checked the list of people waiting, called out names, and had them led quickly through the restaurant and out to the patio. It was a beautiful night, cool, with the crisp smell of fall in the air, so no one declined moving out on the deck, with its gorgeous view of the stars through the arbor of enormous oak trees. I had the four guys out there pouring water, taking orders, and putting the pretzels, boiled peanuts, and cornbread crackers on every table.

The bar crowd thinned immediately, and I darted to the pickup window, where servers were stacked up, some carrying food away, all of them looking frazzled and pained, and a couple only barely held it together. Mackenzie shot me a look of total betrayal, so as I walked by, I gave her a shoulder squeeze before I pushed through the right-side swinging door and into the kitchen. Slipping around the island in the center, I looked over at Lance, who was frying something in a wok that appeared to be on fire, while Oz and Harley, the two sous-chefs, were both doing what looked like five things at once.